The exponential growth of mobile subscribers requires substantial increase of network capacity. Currently, network congestion is problematic on many third generation (3G) networks in a number of markets throughout United States and the world. The congested network causes dropped or failed calls, lower data rates and slow response times. Concurrent with this problem of rapid growth of number of users, there has been a rapid uptake of Smartphone subscribers, such as iPhone, Android phone and Blackberry phone users.
Long-term evolution (LTE) system, which offers high peak data rates, low latency and improved system capacity, is adopted by many operators to address the capacity issue. In the LTE system, an evolved universal terrestrial radio access network (E-UTRAN) includes a plurality of evolved Node-Bs (eNBs) communicating with a plurality of mobile stations, referred as user equipment (UE), via LTE-Uu interface. The radio access network further connects with a core network (CN), which includes Mobility Management Entity (MME), Serving Gateway (S-GW), and Packet data Network Gateway (P-GW), to provide end-to-end services. While LTE network increases system capacity, it is projected that LTE network may soon face capacity problems. In both traditional network and LTE, operators always prioritize real-time voice traffic over data traffic. Resources are held in reserve across the network for circuit-switched voice traffic. New wireless data network, such as 3G and LTE network, also optimizes support for large amount of data traffic with long and uninterrupted data sessions (video conferencing, FTP, etc.) with the focus on bandwidth and throughput.
Such design, however, does not work well for applications with short, infrequent data sessions, such as chatty applications and keep alive messages. Many common applications such as news, weather, and social networking, periodically connect and disconnect to/from the network for updates. These applications contain small amount of user data while still require a large amount of signaling traffic to establish and tear down the session. It is estimated that with the growing number of Smartphone applications over the network, the signaling overhead outpaces the data traffic by 30% to 50%. In addition to rapidly increased data and signaling volume that puts pressure on LTE-Uu interface, the amount of signaling to the Core Network is also a major concern of the operators. Therefore, using data network efficiently is essential to improve network capacity.
Besides improving network efficiency, maintaining quality of service (QoS) is an important area for the successful growth of wireless networks. Applications over the wireless network have various requirements in terms of delay, bandwidth and error rate that they desire for optimal performance or user experience. In light of the exploding growth of the amount of mobile data and various mobile applications, coupled with the wide adoption of LTE by wireless network operators, it becomes important to find ways to improve network efficiency and to maintain the QoS of various applications.
Overall, the problem of controlling and optimizing network signaling, radio resource usage and UE battery consumption for typical smart phones is complex. The smart phone traffic behavior is diverse and different from traditional traffic. Consequently, DRX and RRC state transition may not work as well under diverse data application (DDA) environment. Signaling overhead may increase (both RAN and CN), UE power consumption may increase, and QoS may degrade. One possible solution is for UE to provide additional assistant information to eNodeB for facilitating related configurations. The assistant information, like speed, traffic pattern, battery usage, etc. is important for efficient configuration but difficult for eNodeB to observe.
It is an objective of the current invention to provide a method for UE to collect traffic statistics and to represent the traffic statistics in an efficient and meaningful way to the network for improved UE parameter configuration.